Screen dreams

It all makes perfect sense ... a scene from The Science of SleepLast night I was in Turkmenistan. There wasn't anywhere to stay so I made my way to the alleyways underneath Ho Chi Minh City's Reunification Palace where Nada and Frank's epic fight from They Live unfolded in bone crunching slo-mo. Luckily I was rescued from behind the bins by Jack Bauer. This explains why I'm a little sleepy; those nightly adventures can really take it out of you.

The problem is that no matter how real, how significant, how lucid a dream may be it is impossible to retell it.

"No relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt" wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Fortunately this hasn't stopped film-makers from trying - and most with more success than Steve Buscemi's hapless director in Living in Oblivion.

Now two new films beautifully capture the fuzzy ground between wakefulness and slumber. Michel Gondry's charming, bittersweet The Science of Sleep tells the story of Stéphane, a boy whose world tumbles in and out of sleep. Its antidote, David Lynch's restless Inland Empire offers never-ending corridors, macabre talking rabbits and chorus of dancing prostitutes.

For Gondry, the cloudy moment of waking is seen from inside Stéphane's head, a cardboard TV studio with windows for eyes, and for Lynch, it is Laura Dern trapped inside a flimsy cardboard film set, light flooding in through the windows, as she desperately tries to regain consciousness or, perhaps, her previous life.

Incidentally, the US critic Mike D'Angelo took issue with the very concept of The Science of Sleep. He wrote: "Cinema is an inherently oneiric medium, which makes movies that overtly traffic in dream logic the equivalent of a hat on a hat."

But I'm not sure I'm convinced by this argument, just as I'm not entirely sold on Conrad's. Dreams are not impossible to convey, as everyone from Victor Fleming to Wes Craven has given it a try. So, as I reach for the coffee, tell us your favourite dream films. It's going to be a long day.